Proxy with express.js

Question

To avoid same-domain AJAX issues, I want my node.js web server to forward all requests from URL /api/BLABLA to another server, for example other_domain.co

Answer 1

I found a shorter solution that does exactly what I want https://github.com/http-party/node-http-proxy

After installing http-proxy

npm install http-proxy --save

Use it like below in your server/index/app.js

var proxyServer = require('http-route-proxy');
app.use('/api/BLABLA/', proxyServer.connect({
  to: 'other_domain.com:3000/BLABLA',
  https: true,
  route: ['/']
}));

I really have spent days looking everywhere to avoid this issue, tried plenty of solutions and none of them worked but this one.

Hope it is going to help someone else too :)

Answer 2

I found a shorter and very straightforward solution which works seamlessly, and with authentication as well, using express-http-proxy:

const url = require('url');
const proxy = require('express-http-proxy');

// New hostname+path as specified by question:
const apiProxy = proxy('other_domain.com:3000/BLABLA', {
    proxyReqPathResolver: req => url.parse(req.baseUrl).path
});

And then simply:

app.use('/api/*', apiProxy);

Note: as mentioned by @MaxPRafferty, use req.originalUrl in place of baseUrl to preserve the querystring:

    forwardPath: req => url.parse(req.baseUrl).path

Update: As mentioned by Andrew (thank you!), there's a ready-made solution using the same principle:

npm i --save http-proxy-middleware

And then:

const proxy = require('http-proxy-middleware')
var apiProxy = proxy('/api', {target: 'http://www.example.org/api'});
app.use(apiProxy)

Documentation: http-proxy-middleware on Github

I know I'm late to join this party, but I hope this helps someone.

Answer 3

To extend trigoman's answer (full credits to him) to work with POST (could also make work with PUT etc):

app.use('/api', function(req, res) {
  var url = 'YOUR_API_BASE_URL'+ req.url;
  var r = null;
  if(req.method === 'POST') {
     r = request.post({uri: url, json: req.body});
  } else {
     r = request(url);
  }

  req.pipe(r).pipe(res);
});